Lightweight Cat: 1966 Jaguar Kougar Sport

The Jaguar E-Type maybe one of Jaguar’s greatest sports cars, but Crosthwaite and Gardiner, the creators of the Kougar, saw room for improvement. Crosthwaite and Gardiner, who have been building and restoring race cars since the late 1950s, are experts in perfecting a car’s handling and performance. They conceived the idea for the Kougar in the ’70s, with the intent to design something that resembled the Frazer Nash Le Mans. While the Kougar was very successful, they sold off the rights to finance other activities. There were only around 320 original Kougars built and this is one of the 20 that came to the States.

This Kougar is powered by a wonderful 3.8 liter straight six that was built by Adam’s Racing. The 3.8 liter engine is an amazing piece of machinery. It is known for its free revving nature and incredible reliability, which made it a great engine for a race car. The engine is bolted to a four speed manual gearbox and sits in a tubular chassis. Crosthwaite and Gardiner wanted to build a balanced vehicle, so to keep the weight down they built the body out of fiberglass and shaved any fat off they could.

This car has been fully restored and looks as good as new. The Kougar was styled to be reminiscent of the roadsters of the 1950s and this is true of the interior as well. It’s extremely basic, yet highly functional and would be a comfortable place on the track or the street. It does however look very tight and could be difficult for taller individuals to climb in and out of.

This Kougar is amazing and we would love to own this beautiful Jaguar powered machine. It can be found here on eBay where it has a current bid of $2,325. Sadly the reserve hasn’t been met yet and we can only hope it is not set too high.

This engine is one evolution of the 2.4,3.4, 3.8, 4.2 and a few other s starting about 1949. After decades of this wonderful\l lump Jag came up with a modern replacement or two. If the Kougar doesn’t add a t least a zero to that bid, it’s tooo cheap!

Jaguars 4.0 was a 4 valve per cylinder all aluminum clean sheet design which GM bought from JAGUAR just before Ford swooped in and bought Jaguar GM modified it to use Delco stuff etc and used it in their medium sized SUVs (Trailblazer Envoy etc) extremely reliable and decently powerful for the time

Saw one of these at a local car show several years ago. It is a fabulous-looking-and-sounding machine, not at all the cheesy kit car-type vehicle you might expect. It captures the 1950’s Special vibe perfectly, and is probably better built than 99% of the real things would have been. I was in lust.

Rich, no totally diff engine. FORD developed the 4.6 32v Intech to counter GM’s 4.6 Northstar (Cadillac) in the early 90’s. GM’s Northstar is highly prone to head gasket failure around 100K miles, many deals out there on used Cadi’s-STAY AWAY!